


This Tornado Loves You

by ladderax (allnuthatchforest)



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst and Humor, Crack, Loss, Love, M/M, Romance, Transformation, Volcanoes, Weather
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-11
Updated: 2011-07-11
Packaged: 2017-10-21 06:38:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,607
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/222041
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/allnuthatchforest/pseuds/ladderax
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eames is a tornado and Arthur is a volcano. Literally. Well, Eames is a man who sometimes turns into a tornado. Arthur is doomed to permanently become a volcano on his 30th birthday. A little crack, a little angst. Written for AE Match in four parts; all parts are here.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This Tornado Loves You

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings for unstated allusions to terminal illness, permanent transformations, and sad crack. Title from the Neko Case song of the same name.

There has been heat in his chest for weeks and it hasn’t gone away. He went to the doctor and they gave him acid reflux pills, told him to chew slower and avoid citrus and tomatoes. Now he contemplates summer without tangerines, the fragrant dust on his fingertips from scraping off the pith, and he sighs.

Now, as Arthur sits in his car on the median strip, waiting for someone to just dare to blaze past him with a feeling of entitlement or a time crunch or a hankering for the closest thing to a suburban thrill, he feels something like hot cotton in his mouth and he has the uncontrollable urge to spit. He hates spitting in public. Feels like he should give himself a ticket for it.

But if he doesn’t, he thinks, his mouth will scald.

He guiltily creaks open the door, leans down. Prays no one sees him. He spits.

The drop sizzles. It bubbles through the ground, hollows out a little crater on the concrete about an inch in diameter.

*

For years Eames has known he was a tornado.

One day when he was sixteen he looked in the mirror after a shower and there was an extra dimension to the moisture on his skin. A depth to it. He touched his collarbone and found he could poke through it, and it felt like fast rain.

His last thought, before the mirror shattered, was that he ought to go outside.

He was vaguely aware of the towel being whipped away from him. The bathroom was a wreck. Blue-green shards from an aftershave bottle scurried across the floor. The shower curtain writhed and got tangled with his body. He was magnetic. He felt like something better than pure muscle.

He could see, but only through a whirl of gray particles, and his dusty vision guided him outside. He was still thin enough not to burst the walls open. And the carpet rustled beneath him, but he didn’t suck it up. He still hadn’t touched down.

There was no one home yet. He rattled the chandelier as he passed it. He burst open the double doors, drawing a legion of fragments into his orbit, and he was a sharp, heavy, clanking thing moving over the muggy rolling green acres of his family’s property, able to suck and explode and dice and bowl over partly at will and partly not.

He sucked up a sheep and felt its kick in his stomach.

Then, somewhere between the sheep pen and a copse of trees, pain began to hurt again. He released all of the things he had picked up in a violent spray. Glass rained on the ground like a tuneless xylophone. The sheep ejected from where it had been suspended warm in his core.

And then he himself was thrown on his shoulder, in a tuffet of moss, cheek to cheek with a family of red mites. A hoof-shaped black bruise rising on his stomach with a vengeance.

 _I need to learn to control this better,_ he thought, once he got over the shock of having just been a tornado.

*

Sleeping sitting up has its upside: at least he feels tougher, more vigilant. And it controls the burning. Or at least it used to, before it began to spread to his arms and legs.

He’s fallen asleep with a book spread upon his lap when, light sleeper that he is, he becomes aware of a presence in his apartment. He opens his eyes and sees the beady streetlights, the windowframe, and then the outline of a small woman in a red coat sitting on the loveseat opposite him.

Arthur reaches for his gun and points it at her, steady-handed. The woman waves it away as though he’s offering her an _hors d’oeuvre._

“No need for that,” she says matter-of-factly. “If you kill me, someone may not be by to help you for quite a while afterwards. Plus, killing our own is generally not done, and there might be legal ramifications.”

“Our own?” he sputters. “How did you even get in here?”

“Through the windowscreen,” she beams. “I’m a gale-force wind.”

He looks at her witheringly.

“No you’re not. You’re breaking the law, and I can have you arrested. I can arrest you.”

“Well, Officer Arthur, or—can I call you Francis?”

“No. You can’t. You really shouldn’t be calling me anything, but just call me Arthur. Everyone does.”

“Anyway, Arthur. I’m Ariadne.” She walks over to him and sticks out her hand. “And you’re a volcano.”

“I’m what.” And he remembers everything he’d tried to suppress: the hot, corrosive spit. The constant burning in his chest that was now spreading down his limbs. The slowing of his heartbeat. The rugged stony grayness he could see at the back of his throat and the roof of his mouth. It’s honestly a better explanation than any he or the doctors could come up with.

“You’re a bit less lucky than some of us, I’m afraid,” she says apologetically. “Many of us manage to stay mobile, and we’re able to change back into human form. And volcanoes…well, they don’t really get to do that. Once you’ve changed, you’ve changed. Of course, we also don’t live as long. We fizz out young, around forty. You’ve got the potential to have a very long life.”

“But rooted in one place,” he says flatly.

“Well, yes,” she wavers.

“Permanently.”

She hesitates.

“Yes.”

He closes his eyes tightly. He hopes he’s just breaking with reality, hopes that he’s actually somewhere under heavy sedation or dreaming. When he opens his eyes again she’s still there, looking at him with concern.

“How much longer do I have, before I’m—“ He’s unable to say it. It sounds absurd, and also terrifying.

“Your spit has started to burn?”

“Yes.”

“About a year, then,” she says.

He slumps in his chair, staring over her head at his bookshelf, willing his bleary eyes to lose focus and let everything become a gray soup. He doesn’t want to see pity in her big round eyes. Doesn’t want to see anything.

*

Eames is smart enough to recognize the telltale symptoms of his change—the hollow whirring inside him, the coldness that builds from a tiny germ in his gut and spins outward slowly accumulating power like a deadly cotton candy machine. But today he stays a bit too long at that backroom poker game.

He keeps anteing up, but they don’t know that he’s more interested in a different kind of gambling, the kind he’s doing silently with his own body. How long can he risk staying among people and buildings and settledness? It’s become a game. He loves the race to an open space, a little more urgent and deadly every time.

It’s the only thing he loves.

Finally, when he feels like—knows--his chest is about to explode, he excuses himself with a nod, leaving his coat on the back of his chair, and hops into his blue Volvo.

He turns on the radio and none of the songs are familiar. He settles for talk radio, the same argument over and over, a fugue with endless variation on a single bullheaded theme. The sky is growing dishwater gray as he pulls onto the highway—is he doing that, or is it coincidence?

His stomach feels full, distended. If he opens his mouth to argue with the radio, all that comes out is the sound of a freight train passing.

The cars he whips past look stationery. He gives a cursory glance to the speedometer. 80, 85, 90. 100. 110.

He pays little mind to the flashing blue and red lights in the rear view mirror as his car begins to levitate.

*

It’s a boring day on I-70. Arthur’s parked out near the abandoned fair grounds, and he watches the tattered tents flap from his woody awning. In a few weeks they’ll be occupied by Best Cow contests and aging one-hit wonder bands in embarrassing sunglasses.

70 is always a bit of a free-for-all; he shrugs as a half-totalled Corolla almost clips a Dodge Ram. A pickup with a pair of neon Truck Nutz dangling from the bumper passes him. He always secretly used to laugh at those, but he hasn’t found anything too funny in awhile. He’s grown used to the burning. It’s thinking about what it means that’s the tricky part.

He hasn’t been sleeping well. It’s been a struggle to stay awake, and he almost nods off in his seat when he hears a rage-filled horn blaring. He jerks awake in time to see a car streak by, riding the median line for a good twenty seconds, and it almost vanishes from his field of vision, leaving a flotsam of dazed cars hugging the sides of the road, creeping along for a bit before returning to their regularly scheduled jockeying. He flips on his siren, hits the gas, and tears off in pursuit.

There’s something really weird about the car when he gets close enough on its tail to look closely. It’s puffed out, like a can with botulism. And it’s weaving back and forth, which is not odd in itself, but when he looks at where the tires should meet the road there’s about an inch of space. And rising.

He thinks of calling for backup, but decides against it. He wants to figure this one out for himself. And if he dies, so be it. Beats turning into a fucking volcano.

He slams the gas harder, and the car turns hard, crashing through the flimsy picket fence and heading straight onto the fairgrounds. He follows it, ready to rear-end it, when the car jerks a whole foot off the ground, then two feet. Shaking violently before it explodes.

He’s barely aware that his car is still barreling ahead. His eyes are on the enormous lead-gray column of air that has burst from the car. It shoots a good hundred feet up in the air, opens up into a dire-looking cumulonimbus cloud at the top. It’s still hovering over the ground, distressing the tarps, rattling the tent poles. Like a moth’s proboscis, it sucks up rusty cans, beer bottles, untwinned sneakers. It’s thick and tightly-coiled and deadly powerful, and it’s beautiful.

As if it had a will, it is running, running in the same direction as the blue Volvo, dodging, eluding him. He chases it. He knows fully that if he chases too well he could be sucked up. He’s willing to take the risk.

*

He feels his wind petering out, his suction slackening. The five shoes he’s borrowed, none of which makes a pair with any other, lose their weightlessness inside him. A small cat drops out of his gravity chamber.

Finally he drops from his cumulonimbus, landing in a ditch. The fall is a bit harder every time. His human body isn’t matched to his ever-increasing tornado strength. He groans, tries to raise his head. Thinks of running. Can’t even move his sore, stiff, thoroughly unwindlike arms.

He hears the sound of wheels muffled by grass, and doors slamming. _That fucking cop. Fantastic._

Then there’s a male outline bending over him.

“What the fuck was that,” says a stern voice, which goes in and out of the focus of his battered eardrums. “You could have killed a lot of people.”

“You don’t seem particularly surprised that you just watched a man blow up a car and turn into a tornado,” he says, managing a wry smile. “So you know what I am?”

“I don’t give a _fuck_ what you are, and I should arrest you,” retorts the man, who was, now that Eames’s vision was beginning to clear up, actually quite handsome. He has thick black hair and features like skillful calligraphy and astute, care-worn brown eyes, and the hand he places on Eames’s shoulder is shaking slightly. “But are you allright?”

The cop pulls off his jacket and covers Eames’s thinly T-shirted shoulders with it. He hadn’t realized he was shivering.

“No choice but to be, really,” he grins. With a teeth gritting effort he wrenches his arm up from the ground and offers it to the man. “Patrick Eames, human tornado.”

The man hesitates for a moment, looking unbearably sad, before he takes Eames’s filthy hand in his smooth pale one and shakes.

“Francis Arthur,” he sighs. “Volcano.”

*

The day after he meets Eames Arthur begins to have dreams about the change. He is walking in the desert, the terrain hot-colored, featureless, bending off into nothing in the far distance. He’s shivering and doesn’t have the strength to shiver.

His car, all the doors open, is idling behind him, the only point of reference in the landscape. Smoke trails from the exhaust pipe. The sky is deep gray, a badly reassembled broken thing seamed with cloudgrout. It reminds him of something or someone, but he can’t dream far enough into it to know; the dream is a hyperconcentrated version of fate, herding the dreamer brutishly past all tangents, past all things not part of its design.

As he plods along the ground cracks. A hairline fracture at first, then it spreads, a line drawn on a shuddering page, a thickening black bolt. He is growing heavier with every step.

Finally he can’t support his own weight. He sinks to his knees and the ground around him shoots up, walls him in. He’s pouring into the space. His jaw collapses as he screams.

He wakes up. It is a little harder to reach for the light.

*

Yusuf is Eames’s only real friend. He came into town on the leading edge of a cold front and stayed as long as he’s ever stayed anywhere, sleeping on the couch, using Eames’s tiny kitchen to conduct his experiments with molecular gastronomy.

Yusuf claims he’s made the best French fry ever. By objective standards. First he slices the potatoes thin, then he steams them like any ordinary vegetable. The key, he says, is the ultrasonic bath. “It pokes holes in them,” he explains. “That maximizes the surface area. More surface area, more crispiness area.”

Eames has to admit, it’s a pretty good French fry.

They don’t talk about what they are. The day Arthur drops him off at his apartment, after that awkward car ride, he slides onto the couch scored with bruises, his breaths sounding like air through a sad plastic flute. Yusuf is reading in the corner, writing notes on yellow legal paper. He greets Eames with an Army salute, then goes to the kitchen to put on more coffee.

It isn’t that he’s a heartless bastard. The first time he’d seen Eames after his transformation he’d checked him carefully for broken bones and brought him painkillers and water, but Eames assured him that he didn’t need any babying. He was made for this, he said. His bones thin and flexible; cartilaginous. This time there’s fleeting concern on Yusuf’s face, but he heads it off at the pass with his own scowl.

He thinks of Arthur. (“Just Arthur. Call me Francis and you’ll be one big bruise.”) How, somehow, different rules have been forged between them, whether by the circumstances of their meeting or by Arthur’s sort of fate or by the nature of Arthur himself. But he would let Arthur bring him aspirin. He’d let Arthur do things even Arthur didn’t feel the need to do. Like touch his hair. Or bring him a beer, or a blanket.

“Do you have someone who can take care of you?” Arthur had asked, pulling up in front of Eames’s apartment, one eye on the teenagers smashing bottles outside the liquor store.

“Yeah,” he’d said. “Yeah. I do.”

*

A week after they meet Arthur comes home to a brown paper bag. There’s a note stuck to it that just says _To Volcano Boy._ The bag contains: a brown glass bottle, an infant sock (mercifully clean-looking), a plastic baggie, an empty film canister, and a condom wrapper.

He lays all the stuff out on his kitchen table. There doesn’t appear to be any significance to any of it. It’s just a bunch of crap.

He lets it stay there for the next few weeks. The kitchen table is right underneath his calendar. Every time he glances at the five pieces of refuse he also sees the date, time turned into space: all the days behind him x’ed off, null and void; all the days in front of him thin as paper, small as one-inch squares.

On October 20th he buys a calendar for the next year. Still-Lives of the Dutch Masters, not that it really matters. He circles April 5th and hangs it next to the other. It looks like an art installation. "Calendars and Trash on an Unused Kitchen Table."

 _How dare he call me Volcano Boy,_ Arthur thinks.

On October 25th he microwaves a can of tomato soup and sits at the table on a whim. He eats with one hand and swipes the objects aside so that they now look like genuine trash, the remains of the sort of party he’d never have. I should get rid of this shit, he thinks. After he’s finished he gets a plastic bag and dumps it all in.

Before he throws the film canister in, he opens it. He’d never opened it before. And there’s a slip of paper curled around the side. He pulls it out.

 _Come and play with me,_ it reads. _You’re not made of stone yet._

*

 

“Sometimes I think about coming here and sucking everything up,” Eames says, as they walk up a ramp in a dark spiral corridor, catching the molten shadows of sharks on their skin and clothes. “I always wondered what it would be like to have a hammerhead inside me.”

“Is that a come-on?” Arthur asks, cocking an eyebrow.

“Could be, if you want it to be,” Eames smirks. “But seriously. All this glass, all these…fish, and birds, and everything. It gets boring going out to open fields and picking up Coke cans. It was exciting the first few times, but now it’s like the same thing over and over. And, you know, no one’s going to charge me with anything, because people don’t usually turn into tornados. So I could turn in the middle of the street. Rip the roofs off of some buildings, tear some people apart.”

“You really want to do that.”

“Nothing’s stopping me.”

“What about common decency?” Arthur asks, coming to a standstill as a tiger shark pierces his silhouette. “Have people been that terrible to you?”

“No.” Eames muses. “But they don’t have to turn into tornados, either.”

“You’re bitter.”

Eames laughs.

“And you’re not.”

Arthur begins to walk away from him. His shoulders are slumped, and he glances back at Eames only long enough to glare disappointedly at him out of the corner of his eye.

“Arthur, come back,” he says, hastening to catch up. “What I wanted to say is that you don’t have to take your bitterness out on yourself.”

‘So I should just take it out on everyone else, then,” Arthur says coldly.

“No. Take it out on me. Do anything you want with me, really.” He grasps Arthur’s hand, looks into his glassy dark eyes. “Just be with me.”

*

They stumble back to Arthur’s apartment. It feels like a standoff rather than the end of a date. Arthur lets him in, but then he wants to point his gun at him and tell him to get out; the man, he thinks, is angry and unhinged and resentful of anyone who isn’t damned to their same strange fate. He doesn’t want to be around someone like that. He doesn’t want someone to stoke his bitterness. He’d rather be alone.

“What do you want from me, Eames,” he asks finally, hovering tensely by the window. “Because I can tell you that if you just want someone to commiserate with, you’ve come to the wrong place. I don’t want to constantly be reminded of what’s going to happen to me.”

“But you are constantly reminded of it,” Eames counters. “You’re alone here, just trying to forget you exist until it happens. And what I want, Arthur, is to finally be able to tell someone what this is like. To not have to hide it or pretend it’s normal. Because it’s not normal. It’s really strange, and sometimes it’s fun, and sometimes it’s terrible.” He walks slowly across the room until he’s standing next to the couch, only a few feet away. “And I like you, Arthur.”

“Because I understand?” Arthur asks coldly. “Because I’m like you? We’re nothing alike, Eames. We don’t even have—“ he pauses “this thing in common. It’s been completely different for you than it has for me. I guarantee that you wouldn’t like me if you didn’t think for some reason that it was us against the world.”

“I want to take you to bed,” Eames states. There are car lights flashing across his face, and Arthur remembers the first time he saw him, sprawled muddy and trembling on the ground, with dirt in his long eyelashes and the creases of his eyelids. Beautiful as a well-executed ambush. “I want to make you feel good. Can I do that at least?”

Arthur can’t say no to that.

*

Eames pulls down the sheets with one hand while the other arm is wrapped around Arthur’s back. He is dismayed at what Arthur’s bed suggests he feels about his life: one hard, flat, greyish pillow skulking in the crease between headboard and mattress, sheets far too thin for October in Baltimore.

He guides Arthur down gently onto the sagging mattress. Kisses him. Kisses him deeper. Cradles his head with one hand while unbuttoning his shirt with the other.

“I love your face,” Eames whispers.

He unveils Arthur’s sharp shoulders, kisses the hollows. His mouth climbs Arthur’s steep collarbone. Running fingertips down his serrated ribs makes Eames sad. He lowers his lips to Arthur’s navel.

“The first thing I’m doing for you, after I suck your cock, is ordering ten pizzas and hand-feeding them all to you slice by slice." He pauses. "OK. A slight exaggeration. But still."

Arthur groans.

“It _does_ matter. Trust me. I want you healthy for me,” Eames says into the trail of fuzz from his navel to his pubic hair. “We’re going to have a wonderful life.”

*

“You don’t want me to come in your mouth. Trust me,” Arthur moans, straining to watch Eames’s lips slide up and down his cock. Eames grasps the shaft and uses his mouth on the head, trilling his tongue underneath, rubbing his upper lip hotly over the glans and looking up at him mischievously, conspiratorially, from beneath his long eyelashes.

The eye contact, and what is said with it, sends a pulse of arousal to Arthur’s cock, and he knows he’s close.

Eames takes Arthur fully into his mouth a few times, and while Arthur feels his tongue swirling around the entire length and width of his cock, he becomes aware of a deeper suction that isn’t coming from Eames’s mouth, but from somewhere deeper inside him. It’s tugging at his cock, gently but insistently, and it’s delicious.

He forgets about the warning he gave and comes ecstatically in Eames’s soft, eager mouth.

And Eames seems unfazed for someone who has just had boiling lava poured down his throat.

“I’m not sure what the big deal was,” he says casually, nuzzling his way back up Arthur’s chest, teasing his neck with a scrape of teeth. “Yeah, it was kind of hot, but I’ve got this.”

Eames opens his mouth wide. Arthur can’t see anything at first, but his vision adjusts. There, past his uvula, is the unmistakable vortex of a spinning tornado.

*

There’s one upside to their natures, at least. They learn they can enter each other’s dreams.

When Eames lived with Yusuf he was sometimes aware of another conscious presence when he dreamed. Something that reminded him of real life, that told him he had volition and could move around at will. Now, when he sleeps next to Arthur, their arms brushing up static electricity between them, he can see him after he falls asleep. Arthur doesn’t feel at all like a phantom of his subconscious, mutable and murky and not exactly who he is meant to represent; he is Arthur, and there is no gap between his body and his substance, between words and what they mean.

“What are you doing here?” Arthur asked him the first time it happened. He was standing in a desert, his car behind him. Lights on, keys in the ignition. “I Can’t Dance” by Genesis was playing on the stereo.

“I don’t know,” Eames admitted. “Maybe this is it. Maybe we’ve transformed already. It’s not an ordinary dream. You’re actually you. You aren’t just dream furniture. You’re making me realize it’s possible to be really me, too.”

Arthur was silent, hands in his pockets, gazing off towards an invisible but important spot in the distance.

“So if we know it’s a dream,” suggested Eames, “maybe it doesn’t have to be like…this.” He indicated the desert. “It can be better.”

Eames thought of a road. A highway began to unfold in the desert, looking at first like a gray mercury mirror, then solidifying. He stepped towards the car.

“Well?” he beckoned. “Shall we go?”

“Where?” Arthur looked puzzled.

“Let’s try anywhere.”

*

Eames shows him what it feels like to be a tornado. It’s dizzying at first, vertiginous even for Arthur who’s decidedly unafraid of heights. He is helpless to stop the roaring. The feeling of solid objects rattling around inside him is creepy. But he feels Eames’s heart rubbing up against his as they tear down an abandoned highway, raising canyons of dust.

Unlike in real life, Eames can lay them down gently. They roll into each other’s arms and start to laugh.

“Was that boring?” Arthur asks, lips almost touching his. “Or would you rather eat some children?”

“I’d rather be here with you,” he says, delivering an exclamation mark of a kiss. “Destruction doesn’t really interest me much anymore. I can’t give you everything if I’m still hell-bent on revenge, you know? And I want to give you everything. You deserve everything.”

Arthur dreams up a beach and a boardwalk lined with carnival games and food stalls. They walk in full summer heat, gulls wheeling overhead. Lamentably, the ice cream is still not free, but he finds money in his pocket, with exact change.

“I wonder if I’m guaranteed to win anything I play,” Eames ponders, pausing before a shooting game. “I could win you fifty of those giant…Arthur, do you even know what that is?”

“Some kind of horrible cross between an alligator, a fire hydrant, and a clown, looks like,” Arthur says around a mouthful of ice cream.

Eames grins at him and kisses the melted ice cream off of his chin.

He does manage to win Arthur a crocodile-hydrant-clown thing—really, he bribes the operator when Arthur’s walked off to lean over the railing and marvel at a very intense Make Jesus Out of Sand contest, and Arthur knows this--even though Arthur protests that there’s no way he’s going to walk around with something like that. They walk around with the thing for five minutes when a three-foot-high streak comes barreling out of nowhere and grabs the thing out of Arthur’s loose grip.

“Hey!” Eames shouts after him, but the kid is gone in a flash, almost knocking over some skateboarders. “You little shit,” he laughs, in Arthur’s direction. “Your subconscious wanted that thing gone, didn’t it.”

“Imagine what it could do to you, if you piss me off,” Arthur smiles, wrapping his arms around Eames’s neck.

*

Arthur drives him to the fairground the next time he changes. He’s there in plenty of time, able to stand around and think for a few minutes, which was something he’d always tried to avoid. It’s late February, flattened snow still lingering on the ground. And Arthur is there when he becomes himself again, rushing to him, helping him stand. It takes even longer this time for him to gain the strength to walk, and in the car to Arthur’s apartment he finds himself barely able to utter a word. It’s partly exhaustion and partly the knowledge that this is his last change before Arthur’s own transformation, and time is running out for both of them.

Arthur is slower, stiffer, filling up with stone, but he manages to support most of Eames’s weight, levering him up the stairs. He helps him into bed. He peels off his filthy clothes, wipes him down, brings a glass of water to his lips. There is pain twisting his lovely face as he moves to lie beside him.

“No, love,” Eames whispers hoarsely. “This isn’t the home stretch. I’ll make you laugh again. We’ll go away together. We’ve got plenty of time.”

Arthur sighs and spoons up behind him. They dream of London.

*

On April 2nd they take Arthur’s car and head west.

Arthur doesn’t feel much like talking. He listens to Eames talk, about his childhood, his life as a petty swindler and part-time tornado. Eames tells him how he found Yusuf on his roof after a heavy rainshower. _Our kind find each other,_ he reflects. _I don’t know how, but we do._

They pull into cheap motels, the kind that still advertise COLOR TV on those cracking trapezoidal signs. Eames buys him sodas from the vending machines and grabs as many of those tourist-trap brochures as he can. “Look, it’s the world’s largest goat,” he points excitedly. “Should we see it on the way?”

Arthur just knocks the brochure out of his hands and pulls him down on top of him.

They don’t sleep. They drive during the day, watching the landscape plane out and the trees become smaller and brushier. At night they camp out in dingy rooms and make love, keeping their tears firmly caged in the backs of their throats.

“Arthur, I love you,” Eames cries out, for the first time, as Arthur enters him. Arthur stares at the heavy maroon and olive geometric-print drapes, not sure why he finds the lack of sunlight in their room so depressing when soon sunlight is all there will be.

Perhaps it’s specifically the lack of sunlight on Eames’s skin. When Arthur slumps exhausted into his arms, Eames looks gray, ashen. Like a premonition of what’s to come.

*

On the night of April 4th they drive out into the Utah desert. Eames isn’t sure why he always imagined this taking place during the day. Night makes much more sense.

They park and keep the headlights on. Eames has no idea what to do. This isn’t like saying goodnight after a date or before a long trip.

Arthur is calm. He walks faster than Eames, with determined strides.

“Here it is,” he states without fanfare. He is standing on an undistinguished spot, and Eames knows that this is it. He runs to Arthur’s side, holds his face. The high beams don’t reach them here. There is only the moon and the small flashlight Eames holds up between them.

“Arthur,” Eames asks, pressing their foreheads together. “Did I…was it…”

“Yes,” Arthur replies, kissing him. “I love you.”

“I’m not going to leave you alone,” Eames promises. “Don’t worry. I’ll be here with you when it happens.”

“No you won’t,” Arthur says.

“What?” Eames chuckles, incredulous.

“I don’t want you to see it happen. Afterwards—some time afterwards—maybe it’ll be alright. But I can’t stand the thought of you watching. It’s going to be painful, and ugly, and I hate feeling helpless in front of other people. Even you.”

“Oh, Arthur,” Eames says softly. He watches a look of horror forming on Arthur’s shadowed face.

“Eames.” He whispers. “I can’t move my arms. You have to go. Go now.”

“I’m coming back,” Eames swears, voice shaking. “As long as you’re alive and I’m alive. I’ll touch you and talk to you and if there’s any way at all that I can make you feel good, I will find it. I promise. I’m coming back.”

Arthur smiles dimly. Red tears are beginning to flow down his cheeks, and Eames steps back involuntarily.

“Which way?” he asks.

Eames grins at him.

“Both ways.”

*

Arthur closes his eyes so he doesn’t have to see Eames looking back at him as he walks away.

He hears the car rev up and pull away.

An owl screams in the distance.

The earth under him is rubbing against him like an ill-fitting running shoe. It gives way, but catches him just as soon. Because he is part of it.

He is half earth and half air. The heat inside him has found an outlet, has begun to settle and cool. There is an answer to the restlessness he’s felt for the past year.

He thinks of the fingers, rough, thick, gentle, that were on him just minutes ago, and now he feels the memory of touch converted to stone. Hardened. But preserved. Maybe, he thinks, he can still dream, dream his old body, enter Eames’s mind and run with him again.

And maybe Eames was lying about coming back. Maybe this is all he gets: the indelible sense of it, like an invisible carving. It’s more than he ever expected, at least.

The owl cries again. A slight wind whips over him—no one he knows, but it feels alive.

 _Hello_ , he thinks. _Hello_.


End file.
